My special thanks to Richard Young,
true paparazzo, but also true gentleman
(and certainly nothing like Joe Creed, the
dubious ‘hero’ of this novel). Richard’s
help in research has been invaluable.
My thanks also to three other
photographers – David Bennett for more
pap stories, Bob Knight for
technical advice and David Morse for
use of a certain mews home.
JAMES HERBERT
Sussex, 1990
Demons today are a shoddy lot . . .
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
1
The first thing you ought to know about Joseph Creed is that he’s a sleaze of the First Order – maybe even of the Grand Order, considering his trade. The second is that he’s our hero.
(Not by choice, incidentally, is he the latter – not by his choice, anyway. Let’s just say circumstances and his own inglorious nature conspired to make him so.)
His trade? Taking candid snaps of the rich, the famous, or those who fall into that loose category of celeb. Ideally these snaps are of the kind the subject – or victim – would prefer not to be published (of course, the less preferred the higher their value on the media market). Creed, then, is a paparazzo (a scavenger lensman, some might say). Paparazzi is the plural, or ‘reptiles’ as their prey might refer to them. There are other descriptions: parasites, leeches, vultures. Scumbags is very popular. But lest we be too hard on them as a breed, it should be said at the outset that there are some exceedingly nice members of the paparazzi, some who even behave like gentlemen on occasion and yes, even those who are trustworthy. Unfortunately, Creed isn’t one of these.
Sometimes – no, often – his own kind, fellow photographers, snappers, smudgers, monkeys, shunned him (although it should be said that envy played some part here, for Creed had an upsetting knack of capturing on film the almost impossible, of snapping the unsnappable). They thought his methods were despicable.
Something else that rankled with a few of the others in his male-dominated profession was his success with women (as a rule you have to be disliked in the first place for this to annoy others). His romances, to use an unfashionable term, seldom lasted long, but they were frequent and, three times out of five, his partners were definite lookers. He himself, you see, looked a little like Mickey Rourke, the actor (Mickey Rourke at his sleaziest, if you can imagine that) and when he smiled his knowing, almost mocking, smile, women knew, they just knew, he was trouble. And God help them, that was his allure, that was what intrigued the ladies. They sensed he was a shit and, it’s true to say, he rarely let them down in that respect. Still they went for him, still they dipped in a toe and were upset, although not surprised, when they got scalded. Women aren’t easy to understand.
He had other bad points. Joe Creed could be mean, selfish, disreputable. He was a moral cheat, both amoral and immoral – although, in his favour, not all the time. He could be tetchy, obstinate, cynical and, if he thought he could get away with it, belligerent. He had friends, but no good friends. And yet he was tolerated by establishments which would never entertain others of his professional ilk (another point of envy among his colleagues): he was allowed to drink in the bars of several ‘in-place’ restaurants and clubs when on duty, provided his cameras were kept out of sight, and doormen and bouncers of the trendiest and most élite London nightclubs would always tip him the wink if there was a worthy celeb inside. This was mainly because Creed himself was a ‘known’ face, having haunted these places for so many years now; his name, because it had appeared so often beneath photographs of the rich and glamorous, was also ‘known’. He had, himself, become an integral part of the celeb circuit (or circus, if you prefer). As well as that, he knew how to grovel when the occasion demanded, and into whose hands to drop readies when required.
So that’s our boy. A rough idea only, but you get the picture. He’s sleazy, but good at his job; dislikable, yet interesting to certain women; accepted, although perhaps not respectable. You might like him, you might loathe him; maybe there’ll be a balance between the two.
Unfortunately, the circumstances in which we first meet him aren’t too endearing.
He’s . . .
2
. . . pissing into the corner of a tomb, inside one of those big old mausoleum affairs. A tomb, in fact, with a view, for it stands on a small knoll in the grounds of an expansive and impressive cemetery, surrounded by and slightly above others of its kind. As well as these extravagant sepulchres, there are acres of headstones – crosses, angels, obelisks and marble slabs, many of these crumbly and rotted (but not as crumbly and rotted as what rests beneath them). Creed zips up, shivering with the cold, damp, mouldy atmosphere, and leans back against a tier on which a chipped stone coffin lies. He continues to wait . . .
Creed sucked smoke from the thin brown roll-up dangling between his lips, warming his lungs and neutralizing the tomb’s earthy smell. He scratched his chin, fingernails loud against stubble within the confines of the echoey granite chamber (Creed, incidentally, sported stubble before and after it was designer, just as he wore clothes that fitted badly before that, too, became fashionable). He looked at his wrist-watch, angling its face towards the barred doorway through which cheerless light drooped. Not for the first time that morning he told himself there had to be better ways of making a living.
He stooped only slightly to check the Nikon’s viewfinder, for the camera, with its 400mm lens, was mounted on a tall tripod. That lens was pointed down the hill towards an open grave, the mound of earth beside the excavation moist and dark. He imagined the long lens was a bazooka and mentally blasted the narrow foxhole to hell, whispering the missile’s whooshing roar for sound effects. The earth explodes, bone shrapnel erupts from the pit, a thousand maggots feeding on the last of the flesh find the ability to fly . . . Creed closed his eyes.
Unhealthy, he told himself. Hanging around graveyards was definitely unhealthy. Skulking inside tombs was a degenerate pastime. And all for lousy shots of lousy people mourning a louse. Shit, Creed, Mother wanted better things for you.
He straightened, puffing smoke without removing the cigarette. Quit griping. You do it because you love it. The hours might be crazy, the conditions often lacklustre – he surveyed the stony décor – but you still get a buzz when the moment comes, when the shot’s in the viewfinder, when your finger hits the shutter release at precisely the right time, and you know beyond doubt you’ve got the one, the perfect picture. Nothing quite like it, is there? Even the pay-cheque isn’t as good as getting the shot. No, the moment is the thing, the moment rules. The ducking, the diving, the waiting, the scheming, they’re all part of it – every bit of foreplay counts – but the moment is sheer ejaculation. And
if you knew you’d got it, that supreme moment captured on film, the high lingered until it was in print. By then, with luck, you were already on to the next, and maybe planning the one after that, even though planning didn’t come into it much because usually it all happened by chance (you just had to be ready for it). Gimme three big ones, Lord, was Creed’s constant prayer. Prince Charles weeping for his lost friend on the Klosters ski-slope, John Lennon signing an autograph for his assassin-to-be, a burning Buddhist or two. Something significant, Lord, something for worldwide syndication, five-figure bids no less, front-page ratings. Gimme a classic like Jack Ruby gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald. Or something like those Vietnamese kids fleeing naked from a napalm attack. Or even Joan Collins sans wig would do. Be good to me, God, time’s running short.
He stubbed out the thin cigarette on the nearest coffin. They should be arriving soon, the bereaved and the vultures and those who really knew the deceased and wanted to make sure the old hag was properly nailed down.
Creed had never heard, never read, a single kind word about Lily Neverless, the actress (actress? She’d played the same part for nigh on sixty years, and that playing was easy because she had always played herself) who was about to be buried today in this rich man’s boneyard. Neurotic, harpy bitch; that had been Lily in life and on stage and screen. Yet the public adored her because she was bad, real bad, larger-than-life bad. That was her trademark. Whereas Joan Crawford had battered her kids with coathangers, old Lil had bludgeoned her husbands (four in all) with public and eagerly greeted pronouncements on their individual shortcomings. They were mean-hearted and tight-fisted, they were miserably inadequate lovers, they were cheats, they were drunkards, they were pathetic, they were pigs. One of them, she proclaimed to help divorce proceedings along, was QUEE-AR – that’s the way Lily enunciated the condition in her curious European-Americanized accent: QUEE-AR! This particular poor devil’s lawsuit against her following the divorce never even scratched court: a cardiac arrest finished him on the day his brief was briefed. To add irony, it was he who had sired Lily’s only child, although even this had now been called into doubt because of Lily’s revelation. Another shared a similar fate healthwise, only this one’s heart attack left him vegetabalized rather than finalized. In its way, this was even more cruel, for he was comparatively young, twenty years junior to old Lil, in fact (and this before toy-boys were commonplace).
It took less than three months for Lily to unload the veg, and legend had it that mental cruelty on his part was cited in her petition for divorce. Maybe the slurpy sounds he made when he tried to communicate (apparently the best he could do with a tongue as flaccid as a spent penis) had a cutting edge of sarcasm to them that offended her sensitive nature; or perhaps the fact that he had to be spoon-fed by a full-time nurse at the frequent and lavish dinner parties that Lily threw, an embarrassing and conversation-stilting business no doubt, put too much of a strain on her endeavours to be the gay hostess. Whatever, she got her divorce.
Interestingly, her first husband had disappeared into the rainforests of Brazil never to be heard of again after only ten months of marriage. At the time he was a minor-league Hollywood star (who’d featured in more than one jungle movie, as it happens, although all had been shot on the Warner Bros’ back lot) and Lily was fresh over from Europe where she’d been a minor queen bitch of the theatre. Only God, the actor, himself, and Lily knew what had prompted her husband to stomp off into the green like that, but the first two were incommunicado and the last one wasn’t saying.
However, the real kicker was the way in which her fourth husband shed his shackles.
This poor old boy – he was older, much older, than Lil – decided to euthanize himself on his eighty-seventh birthday. Euthanize is the wrong word, actually, because the method he chose was far from painless; he was also, for his years, in a splendid state of health, and his mind was in reasonable order apart from an occasional meandering through all his yesterdays. So nobody understood why he had pulverized his favourite St Louis brandy glass in a food blender to make himself a butter and granule sandwich. Surely, they reasoned, there had to be easier ways to exit, particularly at that frail age. By all means use a brandy glass, but for God’s sake, fill it to the brim with the finest brandy, use it to wash down as many sleeping pills or pain-killers as you can lay your hands on, and toast yourself to peace everlasting before pulling on a clingfilm balaclava. The note he had left explained nothing. ‘Had enough,’ it said in scrawly handwriting. Still, by then Lily had learned to wear black with considerable style, and her wakes (the invalid husband had been long dead and buried, and the jungle rover’s undoubted death had been celebrated in his absence) were joyous affairs.
Now this was her own funeral and there must have been those present who, if not allowed to dance in the aisles, would surely have jiggled their buttocks to the requiem, for she’d made an awful lot of enemies in the business and just as many out of it. However, as mentioned, the public had adored her because, when all was said and done, Lily Neverless was a great actress when playing the Woman-You-Love-to-Hate. It’s believed that even Bette Davis had envied her splenetic image.
Creed stamped his feet, the big toe on either one numb with the cold. Bad circulation, he told himself, and smoking doesn’t help. He reached into a top pocket of his combat jacket – the kind of loose, many pocketed thigh-length coat worn by the US infantry during the Second World War – and drew out a cigarette. He stuck it between his lips and squeezed by the tripod to press his face between the rusted struts of the barred door. His eyes swivelled left and right as his hand delved into another pocket for a lighter.
Action! Shiny black shapes gliding solemnly through the gravestone estate, the long hearse carrying Lily’s dead body leading the way. About bloody time. What the hell they’d found to eulogize over beat him, but then, he supposed, showbiz was all to do with pretence and nothing to do with reality.
He moved back into the shadows as the cortège drew nearer, his cigarette remaining unlit. He checked the view-finder once more, then stood poised, waiting.
Mourners appeared from the cars and trailed respectfully after the coffin-bearers; here and there handkerchiefs dabbed at cheeks. Maybe some of them loved you after all, Lil, mused Creed as he focused, searching the gathering for ‘faces’. Ah, some reasonable ones. Gielgud was there, and Dame What-sername – what was her name? Let the picture editor identify her from the contacts, that’s what he was paid for. Attenborough? Looked like him. And Johnny Mills, yeah, that was certainly him. And that one – Christ, was he still alive? He hadn’t made a movie in fifteen years, at least. Looking at him it was no wonder – senility had obviously set in.
A gaggle of old stars was in attendance, all of them no doubt wondering who was next to go. Now who was that one over there? From a different generation to Lily’s. Maggie Smith? Looked like her, but then off-stage she looked like anybody. There was Judi Dench, looking nothing like a Dame. A sprinkling of well-known directors, an impresario or two.
Creed began pressing the shutter release, aiming, focusing, clicking, moving on. Okay, Sir John, is that a hint of a smile I see? Come on, don’t be so bloody enigmatic, you’re not on stage now. A little discreet grin is all I want. Gotcha. Thank you. Next.
That one. Yeah, I know that face. Character parts of distinction was this one’s speciality. Something Elliot. Dennis, or – no, Denholm, that was it. Is that a smirk I see? Well, well. Click.
Creed continued snapping, perfectly happy in his work and no longer feeling the cold. He changed film and allowed the camera lens to roam here and there, the tripod holding it steady for each long shot, seeking out personalities among the general mill, mentally summoning up a story behind each cameo shot: the Minister for the Arts in deep conversation with a screen seductress of ‘sixties’ British comedies, whose penchant was for the ladies rather than the men; a huge-nosed chairman of the country’s leading chain-stores, whose reputation had been considerably enhanced by the ‘kiss
and tell’ revelations of his last bimbo but two; the television newscaster, whose recent payrise had elevated him way beyond his station (or any other station, his disgruntled rival newscasters pointed out). Creed’s greatest hope was that an over-distraught person would leap on to the coffin as it was lowered into the ground, but common sense told him it just wouldn’t happen, because no one would be that upset over Lily’s departure (not even the accountants at Twentieth Century Fox, for she hadn’t made a box-office hit for many a year now).
He swapped over to his other Nikon, this one fitted with a zoom lens, and took general crowd stuff, only occasionally homing in on individuals.
He shook his head in disappointment when the party finally began to break up. There had been a small chance that Lily Neverless’ daughter, her only surviving kin as far as it was known, might have been allowed to attend. That could have brought some poignancy to the proceedings, especially with two white-coated orderlies by her side (all right, maybe they were more discreet nowadays, but that didn’t stop Creed’s imagination dramatizing or picturizing the scenario), but he guessed that whoever was in charge of her welfare nowadays had decided against letting her loose for the occasion. Pity.
When most of the crowd had drifted away, Creed moved further back into the tomb and lit the cigarette that had dangled cold from his lips throughout the session. The event was covered, he’d done his job; but where was the shot, where was the one that would make the other snappers, the rest of the pack that had been held at bay outside the cemetery gates along with the ghouls, sightseers and devoted fans, sick with envy?
He allowed himself a weary grin. That was the trouble with the young Turks nowadays – no balls. There were relatively few paparazzi left who took genuine risks or even tried to buck the system; they wanted it handed to them on a plate. True enough they’d kick, elbow and shove each other to get a clear shot, but cunning and chutzpah seemed to be in short supply. Creed, himself, had arrived at the upmarket boneyard just after six that morning – there’s dedication for you – and had driven around the high walls until he’d found a quiet spot in a country lane far away from the main gates. He had parked opposite, beneath some trees, then crossed over and used a small aluminium stepladder (often essential equipment) to reach the top of the wall. His camera bag and tripod had been lowered to the other side by a length of nylon string with a hook at one end; the same had drawn up the ladder after him. Creed had dropped into the cemetery and waited, crouched against the wall, until it was light enough to search for an open grave; if it hadn’t been dug the night before then he would have waited for the diggers to arrive and followed them to the spot. It was easier to find than he thought it would be, for there were virgin areas in the cemetery obviously reserved in advance for those who could afford the deposit (no pun intended). ‘PLOT 1290 NEVERLESS’ had been marked on a rough piece of board and planted atop the mound of damp earth beside the oblong pit.